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Editorial: Bring back our infrastructure

Carlsbad Current-Argus

Posted:
05/23/2014 10:03:49 PM MDT

Colorado's U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat, and Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri have an idea that could address two national problems at once. Their plan is hardly a silver bullet, but given the recent dysfunction in Congress, any progress is better than none at all.

The problems they're targeting may not seem exciting — unless you're a contractor or an accountant. But they're important, meaning serious people should pay attention to efforts to fix them.

The first is that a number of U.S. companies are sitting on piles of cash they made abroad and have no intention of sending home given the U.S. tax code's punishing treatment of such income.

The second is that this nation is letting too much of its infrastructure fall into disrepair. Even the venerable federal Highway Trust Fund, to which both sides of the political aisle pay verbal homage, is careening toward bankruptcy.

Bennet and Blunt would establish a $50 billion infrastructure fund that they believe could "potentially support hundreds of billions in loan guarantees and financing authority for state and local governments."

Don't panic. They are not proposing that a federal government already deep in debt appropriate $50 billion for the fund. That's where those large piles of overseas earnings come into play.

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The fund would be capitalized with bonds purchased by corporations that would then be allowed to repatriate some of the profits they hold abroad without the usual tax consequences. The actual way this process would play out is complicated, but suffice it to say that buying bonds would be attractive for some companies.

And attractive for the rest of us, too. As Norm Ornstein explained in The Atlantic, the fund's capital "would be leveraged ... into as much as $750 billion in loans or guarantees for infrastructure projects. A substantial share of those projects would be public-private partnerships, with most of the decisions made not by the federal government, but by state and local governments."

Ornstein deplores the fact that Congress hasn't been able to pass an infrastructure bill. But the Bennet/Blunt measure is truly bipartisan, so maybe there's reason still for hope.